Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar imaging mapping methodology based on FPGA‐DSP hybrid heterogeneous architecture

Abstract

With the development of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technologies in recent years, the huge amount of remote sensing data bring challenges for high-speed transmission and real-time processing. The general platform with GPU, CPU or digital signal processor (DSP) cannot meet the requirement for short delay and low power. Therefore, a field-programmable gate array-digital signal processor (FPGA-DSP) SAR imaging accelerate platform has become a solution for processing performance with a lower latency and power. In this study, an effective mapping strategy is adopted to the FPGA-DSP hybrid heterogeneous architecture to accelerate the processing performance according to the analysis of Chirp Scaling SAR imaging algorithms. As a proof of concept, a FPGA-DSP hybrid heterogeneous accelerating platform is designed and realised. The platform requires 12 s to focus a stripmap SAR raw data with a granularity of 16,384 × 16,384.